Last week while I was traveling with my family, my little girls were listening to an old song called "Make New Friends" and the first part of it has these words:

Make new friends,
But keep the old.
One is silver,
And the other gold.

Now, I've heard this song a hundred times, but it struck me that there are several social media implications here. The problem with some people's understanding, or perhaps misunderstanding with social media, is that they are missing the friend aspect of it all. Sure, the people following you on Facebook are called "friends" or "fans" and these same people on Twitter are called "followers," but the real question for you and your business is whether they're actually friends or not.

How Do You Know If They're Friends?

There are thousands of people who will try to tell you how to get more friends in social media. There is no shortage of "10 ways to increase your Twitter followers" types of advice out there, but there are fundamental problems with that approach. First, it assumes that people who decided to click a button to be your friend or follower are actually paying attention to you. Second, the "get more friends" approach doesn't lend itself to actually cultivating friends. It's more like a relational land-grab, which means it's not actually about you being a friend, it's about you getting names and inflating numbers.

Real friends give. Friends seek to benefit each other mutually. Friendships start with a spark of a relationship, and over time it grows into something stronger. The length of a friendship is supposed make the relationship stronger. It gets better with time. That's why the song calls old friends gold. They are more valuable than new friends.

When you only focus on new friends, the chances are you're actually not getting any friends at all. Tools like Twitter and Facebook allow people with the improper social media perspective to live under the delusion that they're growing a base of friends when in fact they're not. At best, more people are ignoring you. At worst, more people are becoming annoyed by your not-so-friendly approach to a medium that was intended to be highly relational.

3 Ways To Be A Real Friend

There's an old adage that says you need to be a friend to get a friend. That mindset totally works within social media. It may feel slow, but it works. Here are some ways to cultivate true friendships within social media that will help other people and benefit you and your business as well:

1. Determine who your true friends are. When you ask a question or post a comment, do people respond or not? If you consistently get no response, you have very few actual friends. It may be a tough pill to swallow, but at least you'll know where you're starting from.
2. Identify who you want to be friends with. Social media is not about reaching the most people. It's about reaching the right people. You and I would gladly take 500 relationships with the right people for our business than 5,000 of the wrong people. There's true value in identifying the right people and beginning to cultivate the relationships.
3. Start being friendly. It seems kind of obvious, but it really is that easy. Be friendly, giving, and kind. Do things without seeking a return in the near future. If your motives are selfish, the other person will eventually find out and you will have wasted your time because it will undermine whatever you think you were building with them.

If you have a lot of social media "friends" but don't see it paying off for your business, then it's time to do some evaluating. Chances are you don't have as many friends as you think you do. Chances are you weren't a great friend yourself.

Start being a friend to those old friends you've had for a while. After all, they're gold. As you identify new people, take the time to really be a friend rather than seeking to gain from them right off the bat. In the long run, you'll see the value of a smaller group of friends for your business rather than a large number of people who were never your friends to begin with.

Who knew you could combine The Muppets and a classic rock song like Bohemian Rhapsody and get such an entertaining video?

I had the chance to sit down recently with Harris III, a master illusionist, who has been using social media for his business for about a year now. Harris has a great story about how he used a YouTube video to reconcile a customer service issue with a Wyndham Hotel several months ago. He's also seen social media help drive people to his shows and knows it helped him sell out some shows in a few cities, yet he still feels like he's a social media in-betweener...meaning he's not brand new to social media, but he's not convinced he's doing everything he should be either.

In this conversation with Harris, you'll hear what he's done, what he's doing, and what's worked for him along with a key revelation he had that's shifting the way he's using social media now.

I'm not a big hockey fan. I have been to a few Nashville Predator games over the years. I'm more of a football guy, but for some reason I think I could get into hockey if they were serious about these slight game modifications.

NHL Tries To Woo Fans By Increasing Scoring With Bigger Nets, 3-Point Line

In the recent episode of The New Mediology, Nathan, Alison, Ray, and I discussed a story about a marketing firm that sued a former client for what the ex-client said about the firm on Facebook and Twitter. The former client criticized the company so the company sued him. The big takeaways from the discussion are:

1. You avoid legal trouble when you make a statement of fact. Once you go outside that, you open yourself up for litigation.
2. There are legal issues and public relations issues. In business, you need to recognize that just because you have legal justification, you might lose more by pursuing it when ultimately you have a PR problem that is resolved a different way entirely.
3. It's important to understand social media so you respond appropriately to criticism that may come from social media.
4. Social media tools give you the means of responding quickly. If you aren't using a blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc. you're missing some platforms to deal with criticism and respond to customer service issues.
5. When you respond to anything, you bring balance to the discussion. Don't be afraid to respond, but again, understand the right ways to respond and the culture within which you will be responding.

You can hear the entire discussion from The New Mediology podcast in iTunes or you can listen online.

That title pretty much describes my feeling about this conversation with Jenny DeVaughn of Social Precision in Atlanta. I met Jenny at Barcamp Nashville last month and realized she has expertise in LinkedIn...something I have been less than enthusiastic about in the past.

In this video Jenny provides excellent insight into how to think about LinkedIn.

The biggest takeaway for me is that LinkedIn is NOT a communication tool like Facebook or Twitter. It's a research tool. If you make that distinction, it changes everything. Jenny shares some of the ways (some of which are almost scary) you can tap into LinkedIn for business research, business development, networking, and competitive intelligence.

If you're trying to figure out where (or if) LinkedIn fits into your social media strategy, I think the 12 minutes in this video will be helpful. I know it's got me rethinking LinkedIn.

What You May Have Missed In LinkedIn from Bill Seaver on Vimeo.

Words can't really describe this song. You just have to experience it. Enjoy the eagle song from Shane and Shane.

I just got off the phone with a former client. I haven't worked with him for over a year, but we've continued to stay in touch from time to time and he's about to launch a new phase of the business so I'm meeting with his team next week. This pleases me to no end, and not for the money, though I'll happily charge my hourly rate, but for the fact that a past client is about to become a current client.

I've seen far to many people in the service industry who don't want anything to do with people they've worked with in the past because of poor service. I wonder about that for my own business sometimes because I want to make sure I'm always adding value to my customers.

If you're in a service industry of any kind, do you ever ask yourself if past clients are future clients, or better yet, current clients?

Maybe it's time to do a little evaluation. How many of your past clients have contacted you in the last three months? How many of them probably would if they needed your service?

If you never hear from past clients, you don't necessarily have a problem, but you might. I know this post isn't about social media like I usually talk about, but rather the business of serving well.

If you serve well your past clients are future clients.

If you serve well, your past clients recommend you, and give you future clients.

If you serve well, your past clients could become current clients, and I think that may be one of the best self-evaluating tools about your company and services you have at your disposal.

Last week I conducted a little experiment to between Facebook and Twitter to see which one generated more discussion. My hunch has been that Facebook provides more engagement and conversation, but I wanted to see if that would be true when I was intentionally comparing responses to the same questions.

To run this little experiment, I posed the following statements/questions to both Facebook and Twitter simultaneously. At the time of these posts, I had 1,920 followers on Twitter and 770 friends on Facebook, so theoretically, I'm talking to over twice as many people in Twitter as Facebook. Here are the results...

Tweet/Update #1 (posted Monday, Nov. 2)

"Well...we're having a boy. After two girls a boy is on the way. Looks like I won't mow my lawn forever after all!"

Response:

• 25 followers replied from Twitter
• 10 people commented and 9 people "liked" the update on Facebook

Tweet/Update #2 (posted Tuesday, Nov. 3)

"Saw someone with Christmas decorations on their house. Can we throw a premature celebration flag? Is it too early or that just me?"

Response:

• 4 followers replied from Twitter
• 6 people commented in Facebook

Tweet/Update #3 (posted Tuesday, Nov. 3)

"Good comments re: Christmas decorations. What about the music? Anyone listening to it yet? I don't start until after Thanksgiving."

Response:

• 5 followers replied from Twitter
• 5 people commented and 1 person "liked" the update on Facebook

Conclusion

After taking a look at the numbers I have to conclude that Facebook is more conversational for general discussion. Twitter has shined, however, when I've talked about more professional things, but when it comes to anything personal, fun, cultural, etc. I have seen time and time again that Facebook is the place where more conversations happen. I'm not sure what to make of this as it relates to businesses using either of these tools and I'll be curious to see if others have similar experiences, but for now I think I'm seeing Twitter differentiate as a largely professional social network whereas Facebook continues to hold steady as a more personal social network.

On an interesting sidenote, a few days ago I Tweeted that I had run this experiment and asked people to guess whether Facebook or Twitter was more conversational. Everyone predicted Facebook, including the four people who responded via Twitter.

I don't know how many mascots there are in the world, but this video goes to show you that there's an opportunity to be remarkable no matter what you do.

Word of mouth marketing is the holy grail of the marketing world. It's the most attractive and effective strategy, yet it's also the least predictable and uncontrollable. If someone ever tells you they're going to develop a word of mouth marketing strategy for you, what they really mean is that they're going to develop something they hope people will talk about, thus resulting in word of mouth marketing. Whether or not people will talk about it is something you have no control over. If you're promised anything other than giving it the best shot to be talked about, someone is overselling their services.

The great thing about social media is that it allows any business to position itself well for word of mouth marketing. Here's why I say this: word of mouth marketing is people telling others about something. That's the core of social media marketing and a content promotion strategy. You want to use content that people will find valuable and then pass along. The social media tools simply let this happen exponentially faster than the old word of mouth marketing. Just think about how quickly something can spread on Twitter or Facebook for instance. It's still word of mouth...just at hyper speed.

Two years ago Ketchum released the findings of a study that verifies this. Here are two interesting quotes from the study:

"Advice from family and friends is the No. 1 source that consumers turn to when making a variety of decisions ranging from purchasing consumer electronics to planning a vacation."

"Communicators rank their company's own Web site as the most effective way to share corporate news or issue a response to a crisis, but consumers rank company Web sites sixth and seventh among places they turn to for corporate news and crisis response, respectively."

What we see here is verification that people telling other people about things is the best promotional tool and that despite any company's high regard for their own website, the people are looking many other places first. This isn't really new news, it's just more of validation. If you're a social media marketer or the champion for it in your organization...consider yourself validated.

I have to say right off the bat that I'm not a big fan of LinkedIn. I've wondered for a while if I've been a bit unfair to LinkedIn and even have a video discussion coming soon (to be posted here on the blog shortly thereafter) with someone who's going to share some ways about how to make the most of LinkedIn. But in all honesty, I never use it and have often wondered if it's more trouble than its worth. If it didn't have such a good SEO benefit for me I might kill it off altogether.

For the most part I don't pay attention to LinkedIn, but there's a particularly annoying feature that doesn't seem to get discussed too much. The problem is that LinkedIn bills itself as a professional social networking tool that connects you to the professionals you want to know, but in my experience, it ends up allowing people you don't know well asking you to connect them to people you don't know at all. I've had this happen a couple times and just recently it happened again.

What's It Look Like
Here's how it plays out: someone who's connected with you on LinkedIn sees that one of your connections knows someone they want to know. So, Person A is someone you know. They want to know Person C, who is not someone you know, but Person C knows Person B, who is someone else you know. So there you are being asked to connect A to C via B and you have to decide if you want to be the one to make that connection and if it's worth the relational equity to spend with B to ask for furthering this connection to A. To me the whole thing seems like a good idea in theory but the reality of it isn't so pretty. One several occasions now it's turned out that I don't know what Person A's intentions are and I don't really know person B very well either, not to mention I have know idea the relationship between B and C.

I feel stuck between being the bad guy to Person A because I'm not being very helpful and taking advantage of person B, because my only interest in them is someone they know. I think there's a great opportunity for people to feel abused, spammed, or just down-right taken advantage of. I'd like to avoid all of these.

What You're Really Asking For
My suggestion for people using LinkedIn is to remember that just because you can see who your friends are connected to, and who their friends are connected to, doesn't mean that you need to start putting people on the spot. If you start pushing on those relationships for your own gain, the chances are you're asking people to spend a lot of relational equity that they might not want to spend. Instead, do the hard work of figuring out how to get to know the person you hope to meet in a more authentic way. Twitter's actually pretty darn good for that sort of thing and you don't put a few other people on the spot in the process.